Predictable. Pleasant. Puffy.

A bowl of Rice Krispies has nothing on this bland little collection of stories about things that almost happen and people that almost change. Lots of phrases that pop explosively in your literary mouth as you chew on them but leave only a little milky residue on your book-tongue; eg: "She reached forward, and a spark of static electricity went from her forefinger to his. It startled him, and he realized the ember of energy could not be accidental. It was a sign. After all, electricity was a special power, his field." (from "Months and Seasons," p121)

A movie industry party brings together a lying clerical worker and a naive, boring electrician and sparks fly. So what? After the brief blat of that paragraph, the best one in this title story of the collection, there is little left to be said about this collection except, if you like that example, you'll like the book. If you take my advice, you'll spend those fifteen dollars on other books with more staying power and better craftsmanship.

Novelist David Scott Milton ("Kabbalah", a delightful suspense novel) blurbed Meeks' first collection by comparing him to Raymond Carver. Blasphemy! Outrage and rioting should shake the literary world to its roots! This writer, now on his second collection of stories ("The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea", apparently an award winner, was first) and with a published play-script under his belt ("Who Lives?"), barring something enormous changing in his life, ain't getting any better. ( )

Christopher Meeks stories are full of people who push through the obstacles of life and overcome their deepest fears in order to find joy in living. Months and Seasons, Meeks second collection of short stories is a delightful book which introduces the reader to characters who are ordinary, but in their ordinariness remind us of the common threads which bind people together.

In the story Catalina, we meet a man who is traveling to Catalina via a catamaran. He is grieving the loss of his son. He meets a woman on the boat who optimistically tells him that Catalina is ‘like a persimmon - unexpected fruit on a naked tree.‘ The man’s discovery that there is still beauty in the world, despite his devastating loss, allows him to go forward into his life. This simple story is an example of the hope which Meeks infuses into all of his stories as his characters confront their fears of aging, mortality and the sometimes insurmountable challenges of relationships.

In some stories, the characters must battle their own inner demons to make sense of the world and their place within it. In A Shoe Falls, Max must evaluate his marriage to Alice - a woman who clutters the house with her shoes. He wakes from a dream about owing a cab driver $150,000 and thinks:

' …if the ride was getting so expensive and monotonous, why hadn’t he asked the cab driver to let him off? Why hadn’t he done more than sit there, bouncing in the back seat pondering his sanity? He was a passive man, goddamn it. -From Months and Seasons, A Shoe Falls, page 72-'

Max’s inner journey in this story looks at how one man (who could be any of us) examines his “dreams” in the face of his reality. Will he be able to overcome regret for what he has does not have in order to accept what is?

My favorite story of the collection is Breaking Water - which opens with a supermodel awakening from open heart surgery. Merrill appears to have lost everything of importance in her life - her career as a model, her marriage, and her vision of who she is. She must begin again and turns toward art school as a possible answer. Merrill’s story is one of falling down and getting back up again; of finding hope in the midst of despair. It touched me.

And this is perhaps the strength of the collection - in showing us the lives of these ordinary characters, Meeks exposes what is human in all of us. Who has never felt life was not living up to expectation? Or looked at the years unraveling and wondered if we had the time to do everything we wanted? Or experienced a loss so big that hope seemed irretrievable? Or found our fears so encompassing we felt paralyzed to overcome them? Meeks explores these ideas with humor and sensitivity, and creates a collection hard to put down.

For those readers who love short stories, Months and Seasons is a must read. Highly recommended. ( )

“Months and Seasons” is a particularly refreshing book of short stories. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of short stories whose characters and situations seem so varied, even though most were males in the United States. Even the narration style was varied, alternating between first- and third-person, even a story in second-person narration, which is fairly unusual.

From the very first story, I felt close to the protagonists. It was as if a friend or close acquaintance was recounting a night, day, week, or year from his or her life. The characters all seemed quirky and easy to relate to. Meeks is very talented in being able to flesh out his characters in very few pages. Actually, perhaps a better analogy than a friend or acquaintance telling you the story, they seemed like stories one might overhear on a train or in an airport. They were stories that did not always give you a large degree of background on the characters, but still made them seem like real people.

Overall, I think this is a lovely story collection and it is one that I can definitely recommend. ( )

Christopher Meeks sent me a copy of his latest collection, Months and Seasons a while back and I’ve been eager to read it. I love the cover and the descriptions of his stories sounded interesting. After finishing a 600+ page novel, a collection of short stories for my next read seemed like a wonderful change of pace. For the first few stories, it was. In the end, however, I was happy to get back to the world of novels.

I am not someone who frequently reads short stories. It isn’t that I don’t like short stories, but novels simply are my preference. While I enjoyed Meek’s characters, most especially Frank in “The Holes in My Door,” I found myself wanting more. When I finish reading a good novel, it feels like a complete experience. If I don’t, it’s a sign that the book didn’t work for me. With short stories, this is intensified for me. This isn’t necessarily about the quality of the story, but about the structure of the genre. During my reading of Months and Seasons, I kept having questions: What followed the night of the Halloween party in “Dracula Slinks into the Night?” How did Albert’s life change after “The Sun is a Billiard Ball” finished? Unlike, “Did Rhett and Scarlett get back together?”, they weren’t satisfying questions for me. I don’t need (and usually don’t want) to have everything neatly tied up in a bow at the end of a novel. I just need enough to go on to make my own conclusions. I typically don’t find this in short stories.

Christopher Meeks is a talented writer. If he writes a novel, I will be one of the first in line to read it. Please dont’ let me issues with short stories keep you away from this book. I would highly recommend his short stories to those who enjoy reading short stories.

http://literatehousewife.wordpress.co... ( )

This is Christopher Meeks second book of short stories and I'm sorry that I haven't read his first, which was an award winning collection. I read these 11 stories through the first time for pleasure and it was that. I like them a lot. The characters here, whether humourous, tragic, or mildly absurd are likeable, believable, and not always predictable. Like ordinary people, but with quirks that make them memorable. I haven't had a collection of short stories stay with me as vividly for quite some time. Even better, when I looked back through them I realized that there's not a weak one in the bunch. The author clearly edited himself, choosing and arranging this group of stories carefully. I've always preferred longer short stories so I wasn't surprised that "The Sun is a Billard Ball" at 32 pages in length would appeal to me. Or the 25 page "Breaking Water". But even "Catalina" at only 3 pages is a solid and emotionally powerful account of a man's unexpressed grief . I read it several times because what the author doesn't say is as telling as what he does. This is the sign of a good writer. In the first of these three stories, the uncertainties and fears of impending illness and diagnosis are palpable, the tension is familiar and real. In the third a Greek American man, advised by an acquaintance to spend the day on Catalina Island, is angry and judgmental until " he is surprised to see that the dry hills leaping from the water were like the Chora Sfakion in Crete. His friend must have known."
There's a wide range in age and emotional experience of his characters. Whether it's a seven year old who's afraid of water in the more lyrical "The Wind Just Right " or a seventy-eight year old playwright losing his home and life's work to wildfires in" The Old Topanga Incident", Meeks is capable of seeing and writing from very different perspectives. He shows great versitility too by writing in the voice that most suits each story. His use of the first person singular for the main character of "The Holes In My Door" lets us into the depression and obsessive fears of this recently seperated man who's slipping into paranoid behaviour. Any other perspective would not have had the same power. The use of the second person in the "Topango" story work well too. "You open the door" to shouting firemen,"you run down two flights of stairs", "you grab the play, the only copy", "you wonder whether you can make it through this". The urgency and loss is keenly felt by the reader, it's perfect.
I especially enjoyed the title story "Months and Seasons". The main character is determined that the love of his life will have the name of one of the months or seasons of the year. He won't even date someone who doesn't fit the bill. This tale about putting limits on our own fate is touching and funny. When a woman at a party introduces herself as "August" I laughed out loud. Meeks creates believable female characters too as in the final story "Breaking Water", where a model must reshape her entire life after heart surgery. Her inability to get pregnant causes her husband to abandon her, but not until after she has recovered from surgery. He doesn't want to look bad after all. We are rooting for her at every new turn in her life. This is a great collection of stories that I look forward to reading again. Highly recommended.

There's icing on the cake here too with "The Hand", an excerpt from "The Brightest Moon of the Century" at the end of the book. This novel in the form of related short stories will cover 30 years in the life of a young Minnesotan named Edward. The first of these stories made me want to know more about what happens to Edward. Given this writer's gifted sense of storytelling, I expect this new book will be a winner too. ( )

This moving collection of short stories covers a full range of life experiences. Short stories excel at conveying one particular emotion each and Christopher Meeks delivers a variety of them here. Each short story feels rounded on its own as a complete vignette and all together, they make this collection shine with humanity and intelligence.

Many of the stories deal with couples, in all sorts of situations. There is a story about a couple going to a hypnotists’ show - the wife wants to let go and have fun, but her husband holds her back from immersing herself in the experience. Another couple with a reluctant husband attends a Halloween party together; he learns to have some fun. My favorite story, however, was that of an old man, a writer, whose house burns down. I thought it perfectly summed up how we all cope with disaster; our lives fall apart but we must put up a show for the rest of the world and pretend that we will be just fine.

As I was reading, I’d be excited for the next story when I felt the one I was currently reading begin to wrap up. I never wanted to put the book down between stories because I just wanted to read more of them. I’ve got his first collection sitting in my Amazon cart for when I make an over $25 purchase because I really, really want more of his writing. I was thrilled to see the bonus track from his next book and I can guarantee I’ll be buying that one as soon as it’s released.

I would definitely recommend this one, whether you’re like me and want to read all the stories through at once, or whether you’d like to read just one story between errands on a busy day. This collection is beautifully composed and certainly worth your time.

http://chikune.com/blog/?p=207 ( )

A simile to a roller coaster is apt here; some of the stories gently unfold, others surprise with their twists and turns. The work is quite varied in style, but consistent in its high quality. I was reminded of Roald Dahl’s short pieces when I read “The Farms at 93rd and Broadway”, about an older couple who unexpectedly attend a hypnosis demonstration instead of the Broadway show they had set out to see; by the end of the piece I was wondering which character was showing signs of senility and which was bluffing.

Some pieces are heavy on dialogue, others rely more on detailed narration. “The Holes in My Door” begins as a piece about a man suffering from depression more than a year after his wife has left him. Meeks deftly tells the tale in the first person, as the unnamed narrator slips deeper and deeper into paranoia: “I heard noises outside each night, things I had never noticed from my room before - an odd, loud cawing for instance. Couldn’t be a bird - few birds are active at night. Must be a robber calling to his cohort …”

At the young end of the age spectrum is a 7-year-old girl at camp, afraid of getting in the lake for swim lessons. At the opposite end is a 78-year old man and his experience of “The Old Topanga Incident.” This story is based on a ravaging fire that consumed over 16,000 acres in November 1993; it is gripping not only because of the way Meeks tells of the force of nature that is the Santa Ana winds fueling the fire, but also because of the urgency expressed by the point of view Meeks chooses. “The Old Topanga Incident” is told as if the narrator is telling it to you, not you-the-reader, but you-the-protagonist, as you watch all your worldly, and highly-prized, possessions, burn to ash:

"You open the door and you see a number of things simultaneously: two firemen in bright yellow rubberized coats stand before you, shouting, “You’ve got to get out now!” Two hundred yards up the hill is a wall of flame, and the house of the svelte woman with the dog burns brightly as if it were made of gasoline. Flames shoot high. Embers the size of your fist land in the juniper and cypress trees in your yard, on your car, in the driveway."

For a sneak peek at the “ups and downs,” written about in Months and Seasons, watch this YouTube video of an actor-read excerpt from the story “Whiskers”, introduced by Meeks. His work has appeared in Rosebud and Clackamas Literary Review as well as other literary journals. A previous collection, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea was published in 2005. Learn more by visiting the author’s website or subscribing to his blog. Climb aboard the roller coaster that is Months and Seasons; the ride will stay with you for a while!

full review at: www.sheIsTooFondOfBooks.com ( )

Months and Seasons is a collection of short stories. In it we meet a variety of people in different stages of life, dealing with different conflicts and life altering events. They all search for happiness for themselves and their loved ones.

Some of my favorite stories include Dracula Slinks Into The Night about a man attending a Halloween party (I really identified with this guy!), The Farms at 93rd and Broadway about a husband and wife attending a hypnotist show, The Sun Is a Billiard Ball, two stories that eventually weave into one, The Old Topanga Incident where a whole man's life burns to the ground, Months and Seasons about one man's perception of what he wants, and Breaking Water about a woman reinventing her life.

I really liked the variety in the stories. Some were humorous where as others were more serious. With some short story collections it ultimately feels like the same story repeated over and over again slightly different each time, this is definitely not the case here. This collection provides peeks into many different lives in way different ways all by the same author!

On a side note, I really enjoy when an author includes a peek at their next book. At the end of this book we get a peek into The Brightest Moon of the Century with the story The Hand. I really like his idea of a collection of stories of one man's life throughout his life, covering 30 years. Meeks compares it to The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, another book I need to read. I really liked The Hand and look forward to reading the whole collection. ( )

I find short stories to be like snapshots, quick peeks into worlds and situations I would otherwise never have experienced. The best of them have an easy rhythm that lends itself to an almost effortless reading experience and allows me to lose myself in the stories for the whole time it takes me to read their fifteen or twenty pages. But all too often these days, short story collections are similar to the CDs being produced by the major record labels: great title track, one or two other catchy tunes, plus a whole lot of filler material needed to bring the whole thing to the required twelve tracks. I am pleased to report that if Months and Seasons, the new collection from Christopher Meeks, was a music album, many of its twelve pieces would be destined for the charts – no filler here.

As suggested by the book’s title, the stories offer short looks into the lives of characters that are experiencing the various seasons of a lifetime. There are stories about children, about young singles and couples, about couples closer to middle age, and about men even closer to the ends of their lives. But whatever their age, all of these characters are coping as best they can with the problems and situations that life is throwing at them at that moment. Some of their conflicts are of the life-changing variety and others are of the everyday type similar to what most readers will have experienced for themselves at some point in their own lives. The particular beauty of this story collection is how Meeks is able to make his reader care as much about the little girl trying to get over her fear of water as for the aged writer who is about to lose a lifetime’s accumulation of memories to an out-of-control brush fire.

I find it difficult to choose a favorite Months and Seasons story from those that strike me as being exceptionally memorable. If pressed to choose just one, I would likely end up with “The Wind Just Right,” the story of a little girl who is lulled into losing her fear of water, and actually learns to swim, in the hands of a young teacher who herself learns that she is exactly the teacher this little girl needs, someone the little girl will probably remember for the rest of her life. The way that both girls gain self-confidence and the ability to trust their instincts makes this a beautiful story.

In “The Sun Is a Billiard Ball,” one of the longer stories in the book, a couple fearing they have been exposed to AIDS and a man exhibiting symptoms of a deadly cancer find their lives intersecting in a way that could have not been foreseen by any of them even a split second before it happened. The courage, love and humor of this story make it one destined to be remembered. But, because I don’t want to mislead anyone, I should note that Meeks handles humor and absurd situations as well as he handles serious topics. In fact, he opens the book with the humorous “Dracula Sinks into the Night,” about what starts out as the costume party from hell for one man but turns into an unexpected blessing for him and his wife.

There is even a “bonus track” at the end of the collection, a preview of the book that Mr. Meeks is working on now, The Brightest Moon of the Century, a novel that will, in short story form, cover thirty years in the life of its central character, Edward. “The Hand,” which closes Months and Seasons, is actually the first chapter of that new book, a chapter in which young Edward and his father are both forced to do a bit of growing up. I can’t decide whether to call “The Hand” a trailer or a teaser but its inclusion in this collection was a brilliant idea because it has left me so intrigued to learn the rest of Edward’s story that I will jump at the chance to read The Brightest Moon of the Century when it is available. Trailer, teaser and very fine short story all rolled into one, it worked well.

Rated at: 5.0 ( )

Short stories are a good way to get a sense of a writer, seeing how he or she handles a number of different plotlines, looking at the way stories develop, the way characters are presented and the patterns that emerge over the course of the book. months and seasons is very different from the recent collections I reviewed by Jhumpa Lahiri and Sana Krasikov. His characters are quirky and unpredictable and the stories are refreshingly modern. From Halloween parties in LA to a summer camp in northern Minnesota, his characters never seemed to do the expected thing.

In perhaps my favorite of the stories, "Breaking Water," a former fashion model finds her life making several dramatic shifts. She is recovering from open heart surgery when her husband announces he wants a divorce, their marriage weakened by infertility and infidelity. In the aftermath, she goes to art school, hoping to find some new path for herself. She expects a new lover to be horrified by her scar, but he finds it "the coolest scarification" he's ever seen; she has to remind him that it isn't body art. Her actions and his reponses are unexpected but authentic - people often don't do what you expect them to.

Along similar lines, the characters in "The Sun is a Billiard Ball" don't react to their health crisis in typical ways. Albert has seen the telltale signs, but even though his father died from prostate cancer, Albert has refused to see the doctor, pretending the symptoms will go away. Waking up from a one night stand with Jazz, Wade gets a nasty shock. Still, weeks later, he seeks Jazz out and not only stands by her but wants to continue their relationship.

In "A Shoe Falls", a man wakes up and decides he wants out of his marriage. He's tired of his wife and her shoe fetish and their bickering. He finds his efforts thwarted when his wife is suddenly agreeable...and that just makes him grumpier.

The book is fairly short and some of the stories are only a page or two in length, but the book is still an enjoyable read. Christopher Meeks is a writing teacher and playwright, and has previously published another book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea. ( )

Months and Seasons, the second short story collection from Christoper Meeks, is a exceptionally entertaining and thought provoking offering from a gifted writer. The stories are often curious and clever, while hiding unexpected pockets of wisdom and philosophy. Through the use of an inventive method of storytelling, we meet people who struggle with the realities of existence in an often confusing world, trying to put the semblance of order to events that, for them, defy explanation. Here are curmudgeons and uptight husbands, grieving fathers and deceptive lovers, characters that could be people you know, enmeshed in the conflicts of the everyday. Many of the stories have clever asides dealing with controversial subjects like war, the economy, and violence. Though some of the stories are playful and comical, others deal with more frightening and murky subjects like mental illness and impending death. From the wildly absurd to the quiet fears we all harbor, the emotional range in this collection is impressive.

I enjoyed the more serious stories, as they showed tremendous insight into the way that people rationalize and cope with tragedies beyond their usual scope. One story that dealt with a set of characters who were plagued with doubts about their health had a palpable layer of tension running through it, and left me uncomfortably eager to see who would escape tragedy. All at once I was breathing a sigh of relief, while at the same time realizing that there was more uncertainty to come. Another, that dealt with a man whose mind was slowly unraveling, was genuinely chilling in it's conclusion. It was easy to see the downward spiral of madness in the character, who seemed so benign in the beginning. My favorite story was the bittersweet tale called Breaking Water. It was heartbreaking, and I found that the author is just as talented at writing from a woman's perspective as a man's. One of the stories was decidedly offbeat, reaching a finale that could be interpreted in several different ways, from laughable incredulity to a more somber revelation.

As a collection of stories, I found this book to be well balanced and gratifying. There was a pleasant mix of humor and seriousness that seemed to encompass a huge variety of emotions, from fear and suffering to acceptance and glee. At the very end of the book, the author included the first chapter of his work in progress, a novel written in short story form that follows a young man throughout his complicated life. I found this chapter to be very well rounded, and the main character to be someone who I would like to get to know better. There was a fullness to this story I really enjoyed, and I will be looking forward to reading this novel when it comes out. I had not read the first collection of Meeks' short stories, called The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, but I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and am now quite curious about that book as well. All in all, an interesting read. Bonus points for the insanely cute cover. ( )

Months and Seasons is a wonderful collection of short stories that reminded me why it is that I enjoy short fiction so much. Other reviewers have called Meeks’s characters quirky and offbeat, but I don’t really see it that way. Yes, they’re all a little bit weird…but aren’t we all? As one character says to another in a story called “The Farms at 93rd and Broadway,”

"We’re going to have a relationship here, and as in all relationships, it can get odd."

This sentence could be the summary tagline for Months and Seasons, and only in the very best possible way. Meeks embraces and celebrates his characters’ humanity, and the stories he tells are stories about all of us. They are stories about the ways in which our lives can be changed by momentary indiscretions, lapses in judgment, and mundane neuroses. They are stories that illustrate and remind us of how tenuous the connections and relationships we have really are—how we can come thisclose to unraveling but somehow manage to put the pieces back together.

Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog ( )